Still waiting for McGwire to explain

Tuesday

Oct 27, 2009 at 12:01 AMOct 27, 2009 at 12:59 PM

By BRYAN BURWELL St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS — The Mark McGwire Hall of Fame Rehabilitation and Legacy Makeover Tour began yesterday morning at Busch Stadium, with Tony La Russa serving as scrub master for the former home run king’s tarnished legacy.

If 2010 is going to be the future Hall of Fame manager’s final year in the dugout, then this swan song will be about more than trying to bring another World Series to St. Louis. He will try rescuing McGwire’s sagging baseball history.

Yesterday morning, as he stood in front of a room full of media, La Russa seemed to treat McGwire like one of his rescue animals. He wanted to present him as not merely the Cardinals’ new batting coach, but also as a slice of unspoiled baseball immortality.

It’s not like La Russa can splash scented water on him, tie a bandana around his neck like he’s a scruffy and adorable little mutt and all will be forgiven. The perfume won’t cover up the stench of the performance-enhancing drug issue attached to him for more than a decade. But it’s not about whether he ought to be able to come back to baseball, because I think he should.

This is not even about whether McGwire is qualified to be a major-league hitting coach without spending a day in the minors or majors prepping for the job. McGwire may turn out to be the next Charlie Lau, and if he does become baseball’s next hitting guru, then that will be a wonderful thing.

He first has to talk about the past.

If he does, you have to wonder how it will all go down when he emerges from his self-imposed exile. Will he grab a microphone and purge his steroid demons like Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte have done, or will he refuse to talk about anything but strike zones, pitch counts and the fine art of hitting a hard-breaking curve ball?

“By no means is he trying to hide, and by no means are we trying to hide him,” General Manager John Mozeliak said.

How telling is it that the Cardinals decided hiring one of the most controversial figures in baseball didn’t merit a face-the-music meeting with the public? When you listen to a few of the read-between-the-line comments by the Cardinals’ power trio of team Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr., Mozeliak and La Russa, they seem to suggest they’ve already decided on a McGwire strategy.

No one’s going to mind if the slugger sticks with his notorious “I’m not here to talk about the past” mantra.

“Is any other coach here?” La Russa said when asked why McGwire wasn’t around to answer questions. “Mark’s going to be interviewed, but we don’t think it’s necessary for him to come in here ... but the answer to your question is, at no time did we talk about, ‘Well, what job can we give you so it will be harder for the media?’ ”

The Cardinals are going to make him available, eventually, they say. Sooner rather than later, they say. Maybe by telephone.

So we wait for what is sure to be a scripted act that will allow him to ignore the 800-pound elephant in the room that maybe he got into the baseball record books with the help of a vial and a syringe.

La Russa wants McGwire’s return to baseball to be the beginning of a legacy-building comeback the manager hopes will influence Hall of Fame voters who have rejected McGwire.

“We are going to make Mark available,” Mozeliak said. “How he answers questions is really going to be up to him. But if you look at how” the organization “is trying to push this, we look at what he’s contributed to the game of baseball and look at it in a very positive way. More importantly, we think his attributes can make us better. None of us at this table know exactly what happened in the past, and what we do know is that he is very energetic. ... We recognize Mark’s importance in the game and the legacy he left.”

But here’s where it gets a little fuzzy for the Cardinals and their McGwire reconstruction project. While they cling to the fantasy that he turned himself into a home-run hitting monster who smashed baseball’s record book with an old-fashioned, roll-up-your-sleeves work ethic, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest Big Mac was instead a performance-enhanced science project.

A New York Daily News investigative report on March 12, 2005, begins with these stunning paragraphs:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The recipe called for ½ cc of testosterone cypionate every three days; one cc of testosterone enanthate per week; equipoise and winstrol v, ¼ cc every three days, injected into the buttocks, one in one cheek, one in the other.

“It was the cocktail of a hardcore steroids user, and it is one of the ‘arrays,’ or steroid recipes, Mark McGwire used to become the biggest thing in baseball in the 1990s, sources have told the Daily News.”

The investigative report tells a story from “FBI sources” how McGwire’s name popped up repeatedly during an anabolic steroids investigation in the early 1990s called “Operation Equine” that led to 70 drug-trafficking convictions. According to the Daily News, no evidence against McGwire or any steroid user was collected, and one former agent who worked undercover in the case says McGwire was not a target.

However, the Daily News quoted FBI informants who claimed a California man named Curtis Wenzlaff not only supplied McGwire with illegal performance-enhancing drugs, but also injected him on several occasions with PED cocktails like the one mentioned above.

So that leaves us with a lot of questions needing answers. They are questions that apparently no one with the Cardinals seemed inclined to consider, and evidently Major League Baseball is barely concerned with them since DeWitt said that Commissioner Bud Selig gave his stamp of approval for McGwire’s return without so much as a flinch.

Isn’t it fair game to wonder aloud, considering how the secret to his hard-working success might have been built on the tip of a syringe and whether he might offer similar career advice to any young hitter looking for a career-redefining shortcut to the top?